Whether it be as interested citizens, as architects, as planners or as public officials, it is important to lift our sights on how cities are fulfilling the need not only to be places where people can live their lives and raise their families, and to realise their dreams, but to fill the important role of ensuring that we can all play a part, collectively, in lifting overall productivity and ensuring continuing prosperity, and communicate the critical need to do this effectively to the communities we live and work in.
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I think the new planning regime for Canberra, which has a clear regard for the criteria laid down by the Council of Australian Governments, gives this city the opportunity to fulfil Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin's urban garden city dream, with a strong 21st-century overlay.
Mahony Griffin's beautiful drawings, done in the early 20th century, are among the greatest works of urban visualisation (and merchandising) I have ever seen in city planning. It is a pity that the slightly denser, terrace housing conception by the Griffins receded and died off when Henry Ford's Model T car unleashed the potential for a less compact garden city than they had in mind.
What will Canberra be like in 30 or 40 years time? Even better than it is today, I believe. The evidence of this is an increasing number of young Canberrans either staying or returning later in their careers. That is something a lot of small towns and cities, wherever they are, in Australia and elsewhere, rarely experience. It will also be evidenced by higher population growth rates.
When I was young, my family moved here for six months in the mid-1960s - when my father was an MP. It really was a bush capital then, a bit like a slightly overgrown country town, but it has become a really interesting city. For me, as a seven-year-old, it was paradise, I was a terror on a scooter and riding on the streets in my neighbourhood was a real treat. For the first time, I really saw the seasons change.
Canberra has been evolving and improving even since 2004, when I started visiting the place more regularly again when Malcolm [Turnbull] entered Parliament.
Canberra has really good and beautiful bones. It is the seat of government but it is also a city with the character of a lively university town, with a deep intellectual and cultural base, highly educated workforce, beautiful natural topography, that strong and distinctive Griffin axial layout and a good quality of life, as well as the great national cultural institutions, and other institutions of national and international stature like the Kingston Glassworks - all of which Canberrans enjoy.
You will think this is a strange comparison but in some senses it is a little like Austin, Texas. As with Austin, its lake is a dominant feature; I found that Texas is not just one big desert, and Austin has much of the character of a European lakeside city, nestled on artificial lakes along the Colorado River. And it is, like Canberra, the capital - albeit a state one, even if it is a big state. And, as with Canberra, there was a lot of jostling and politicking about where the capital would be - Austin or Houston.
Like Canberra, Austin has fine universities, especially the University of Texas, which have been the nucleus of its rise as a centre for innovation and technology. Austin was a government and university town until the 1970s. Enabled by the strength of its educational sector, particularly in engineering, it has emerged as a technology and innovation powerhouse.
I think if the stars align in Canberra, and J.M. Keynes's ''animal spirits of capitalism'' become more animated here, as they were in Austin from the 1970s, that will create the third leg of the stool that will enable Canberra to reach its potential as a beautiful but also dynamic and innovative city. The early signs may already be here: it is interesting that Canberra's population growth outstripped that of Sydney and Melbourne in the most recent statistics. It is also important, I think, for Canberra's future to be considered in a way that is well co-ordinated with the development of the adjacent region in NSW.
City regions often spread over state boundaries. And that is why the future of the airport is so important as well. If there is to be no second airport in Sydney's west in the coming decades - and I think there should be as that will create a lot of economic momentum in western Sydney - Canberra airport may have to to fill in the gap.
Lucy Turnbull is a former lord mayor of Sydney. This is an edited extract of the 2012 Walter Burley Griffin Memorial Lecture she delivered in Canberra on Wednesday.
